Li vs. Pei: China’s Prospects for Political Reform, Round Two

With China embarking on a once-a-decade leadership transition, China Real Time brought together influential political analystsCheng Liof the Brookings Institution and Minxin Peiof Claremont McKenna College to debate the chances China’s new generation of leaders will pursue political reform.

Mr. Li, more optimistic on the outlook, argues the case that reform is possible. Mr. Pei, more skeptical, argues that it is unlikely.

In part one of the debate, Messrs. Li and Pei laid explained what sort of reform they thought China needed and argued over whether China’s incoming leaders should be considered reformers.

Advertisement

In part two below, they address whether or not the Communist Party system itself will allow for reform:

China Real Time: What about the decision-making process among China’s political elites? Do you think the current system allows them to move in the right direction?

Cheng Li: China is a one-party state in which the Chinese Communist Party monopolizes power. The party leadership, however, is not a monolithic group. Its members do not all share the same ideology, political association, socio-economic background or policy preferences. In fact, I would argue the two main political factions or coalitions within the Chinese Communist Party leadership are currently competing for power, influence and the control over policy initiatives.

This bifurcation has created within China’s one-party polity something approximating a mechanism of checks and balances in the decision-making process. This mechanism, of course, is not the same as the system of checks and balances that operates between the executive, legislative and judiciary branches in a democratic system. But this new structure — sometimes I refer to it as “One Party,Two Coalitions,” following Deng Xiaoping’s famous line “One Country, Two Systems,” — represents a major departure from the all-powerful strongman model that was characteristic of the Mao and the Deng era.

Now, I don’t want to go into details with these two coalitions. I think people are quite familiar with the concept of the princelings, who largely make up Jiang Zemin’s camp, versus the Tuanpai, referring to Hu Jintao’s Communist Youth League officials. So you have the Jiang camp and the Hu Jintao camp, and they’re competing against each other. This is the Chinese style of checks and balances.

Associated Press

Hu Jintao (L) and Jiang Zemin at the opening ceremony of the 18th Party Congress.

Some people look at the difficulty of finding consensus between these coalitions and say that it’s ineffective. But if the alternative is a return to the strong man politics of the Mao-era that is certainly no better.

There’s another choice: You can continue to move along with intra-party democracy, collective leadership, but make the political system more open, make the competition real, and make the government more accountable to the public.

Presently there’s an initiative, which a lot of people are talking about, to downsize the Politburo Standing Committee from the previous nine to seven members. The change in the specific number itself is probably not so important to a particular faction, but the change is significant on two accounts:

First, the two positions they are considering eliminating are the leaders in charge of propaganda and police. Over the course of five or maybe even 10 years, these two leaders really blocked a lot of economic liberalization policy and political reform initiatives, and so caused a lot of trouble for Wen Jiabao and maybe also Hu Jintao. So eliminating these two positions sends a direct signal that political reform is under way.

The second effect of reducing the number is that it will enhance the authority of Xi Jinping and also Li Keqiang. It will give them more power, more authority, to implement policy. Of course, Minxin is right when he says that right now Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang both are weak. After this Party Congress, there will be not just one retired leader but two, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, exerting influence behind the scenes.

Xi Jinping will be the number one leader, but only as first among equals. His power always will have limits within the collective leadership. But at the same time, they should give him a mandate, the authority, to make certain kinds of moves, otherwise it will really undermine the effectiveness of policy-making and policy implementation.

The other important thing to watch is whether this Party Congress introduces some method of electing the 25 members of Politburo, because that will open up political competition and open the political system, give the leadership a new source of legitimacy, provide a new mandate for the elected leaders.

WSJ: So Minxin, what was your view? Do you think they have the right institutions in place to help them choose sensible political reforms?

Minxin Pei: On this issue, I have a different view from Cheng because, frankly, how decisions are made at the top today remains a mystery, even to the most knowledgeable China watchers. And that says a lot about how out-of-date the current Chinese decision-making system is, because there are still no rules at the very top.

We roughly can guess the procedures through which decisions are made, but why do those decisions come down one way rather than another? We don’t know. So I think, at a minimum, they need to open the decision-making process.

I’ve looked at economic decision-making as case studies. What I’ve found is that the regular process can always be disrupted by the sudden intervention of people who are either retired or who have power over a different area of policy.

In other words, it is still a rule-by-man system not a rule-by-procedure system. And then, when you look at how they select the top leaders today, even now, at the very last minute, we do not know the makeup of the Politburo Standing Committee. We do not know the criteria under which people are selected.

So I think that the leadership style and the decision-making process at the very top need significant change. Otherwise, the policy process will remain not just opaque. It will remain very uncertain for the future. And uncertainty in policy-making is not just bad for the new leadership, it is very bad for China, too.

CL: Certainly so-called intra-party democracy or collective leadership, or the “One Party, Two Coalition system,” has serious limitations and deficiencies. But I disagree with Minxin’s view that there are no rules. I think there are rules, which are important in a collective leadership. Because leaders are weak, they need to rely on rules. The rules include term limits, age limits, local representation, and so on.

The fact that we do not know who will be on the Standing Committee is partly related to black box manipulation by the departing Standing Committee members and retired leaders. That system is certainly flawed, inadequate, and out of date.

Getty Images

A ballot box is used for 17th Chinese Communist Party Congress seen in the Great Hall of the People on October 21, 2007 in Beijing.

But not knowing who will be on the Standing Committee at this point is not necessarily bad. It’s a complicated negotiation process. For the entirety of the U.S. presidential campaign, you don’t know who will be the next president. That kind of uncertainty isn’t always a bad thing.

The important thing is whether they overcome the old model. China will not make a jump from the old system straight to democracy, but intra-party democracy could be a positive experiment. And, relatively speaking, it’s only been going on for a short time, only the past decade or so.

MXP: Cheng’s analytical framework – “One Party, Two Factions” – is a very interesting idea, but I’m afraid it does not capture fully the complexity of politics at the very top. Factional lines or coalitional lines are more fluid. And I’m sure there are more than two coalitions, if we can use that term.

If you look at the analytical value of what this model tells us, it’s surprisingly little because when you look at somebody like Bo Xilai, who is princeling, and Xi Jinping, who is also princeling, they are so different. They may have the same sociological background, but that background doesn’t tell us much about their policy preferences. I would be in favor of a more complex, if less elegant, model for understanding Chinese politics.

CL: Xi Jinping, Bo Xilai, and Wang Qishan – we can give a long list of leaders – they’re all princelings. And of course within the same faction, just like within political parties in the United States, there a lot of variations. But this does not change the fact that they can come together, work together.

That does not mean that these people will always agree. From time to time, you need to punish those leaders with scandals. This was a case for Chen Liangyu, the Shanghai party chief. He was a confidant of Jiang Zemin and they needed to sacrifice him for the sake of survival of their faction and the survival of the Chinese Communist Party. It is the same thing with Bo Xilai.

Leaders with scandals should and can be removed, but the factions are too powerful to be dismantled. Besides, for these princelings, they have a very strong identity, a sense of red nobility, the entitlement of inheriting the regime that their parents founded.

You talk about a third coalition, but what is it?

MXP: I would say this third coalition’s actually not that hard to find. I would call it technocratic coalition. This is a rather independent coalition if you look at people like Zhu Rongji and Zhou Xiaochuan – the economic technocratic managers who are more independent, whom the party really needs to make the machine run.

In part three, our experts discuss whether China can tackle the vested interests blocking reform and wrap things up with closing arguments.

About China Real Time Report

China Real Time Report is a vital resource for an expanding global community trying to keep up with a country changing minute by minute. The site offers quick insight and sharp analysis from the wide network of Dow Jones reporters across Greater China, including Dow Jones Newswires’ specialists and The Wall Street Journal’s award-winning team. It also draws on the insights of commentators close to the hot topic of the day in law, policy, economics and culture. Its editors can be reached at chinarealtime@wsj.com.